One of the latest areas to see this sort of experimentation is that of IP, or intellectual property.

Marblar, a startup launched by three British PhD students, is hoping to successfully crowdsource the resurrection of "dormant" IP, to flatten and widen the process of tech transfer. A major British venture capital firm, IP Group, has invested about $600,000 in the startup.

Tech transfer is the process of finding sustainable, real world use for academic research, including commercializing it. Most universities have departments, even entire research parks, devoted to spinning off companies from the in-house research of their professors.

But scientists are busy beavers and "95-99% of university innovations just sit on a shelf not doing anything," say the founders of Marblar, Daniel Perez (Oxford), Mehmet Fidanboylu (King's College London), and Gabriel Mecklenburg (Imperial College London). "As outsiders to tech transfer we found it odd that the process was so closed and parochial. There are simply too few voices in the conversation, and as a result incredible science gets left behind."

With Marblar, scientists post their research as a "challenge." The Marblar community (Marblars) "work toward finding novel ways of exploiting the inventor's discovery." Those in the community whose ideas are used are awarded the equivalent of badges (marbles) and some may receive cash and partial equity in any firm that takes flight due to their suggestions.

Marblar has run a beta in conjunction with Prof. Tom Brown of the University of Southampton and IP Group. Brown offered up DNA Click Ligation, "a piece of molecular biology tech" which can unite DNA strands chemically, without need for an enzyme, and issued a challenge for participants to find new ways of using it.

"We put it online and got some really neat responses so that the sponsors of the competition may well have two new start-up ideas around the tech," said the team.

IP Group and Brown are in discussions with Luke Edelmann, the first place winner and Cambridge University student, about possibly funding a company based on his idea, which "involves solving a problem inherent to screen DNA drugs," according to Mecklenburg, to be built on Brown's work. The second-place winner, also a Cambridge student, is in similar discussions surrounding his use of Brown's DNA Click Ligation to solve a problem in synthetic drug production.

Ideas from the community are riffed on, built upon, criticized, and otherwise crowdsourced themselves, not unlike the discussion in a seminar course.

Marblar is not the first undertaking in the area of crowdsourcing IP nor of incentivizing it. Tobias Thornblad outlines some of the early efforts in the biosciences in the group blog, Intagitopia.

Whether the game mechanics of the project will be valuable or attractive enough to distinguish Marblar from its competitors remains to be seen. You could argue it feels a bit tacked on. If financial rewards to the community come to pass, that could provide real game mechanics by offering a reward everyone values. But the real innovation here may be in the focus on neglected IP, which could prove to be the scientific equivalent of repurposing brewers' grain as cattle feed, turning something formerly considered garbage into something with distinct value.

"A lot of people realize that inert IP is a big problem," Marblar CEO Dan Perez told Ars, "It’s just that no one has come up with a solution quite like ours and we asked ourselves why that is. As scientists, we really have a deep understanding of what our users (mainly other scientists) want. We really want to put an emphasis on building a community of people who enjoy being rewarded for their creativity and problem solving, and enjoy being around other creative people. We are designing the challenges so that ideas are openly posted and collaboration is rewarded. This is really going to use the crowd to its full potential."

"Of note, in our beta our hypothesis was that the crowd would 'compete,'" Perez continued. "We were dead wrong on that one though: they were actually building upon each others’ entries and working together. Seems obvious, but [that] was unexpected to us. But we’re going to facilitate that in our next launch."

Outfits like Marblar have the potential to grow the relationships between scientists, students, and lay scientists, as well as give those involved in the discussions a sense of personal investment in the work. The scientists and students who are the majority of the Marblar community will have a social environment to show off their chops, regardless of where they're located. For cooperating scientists, Marblar may provide a way to squeeze value out of the tailings pile of their research, those elements that would otherwise remain moribund, possibly indefinitely. Finally, and not incidentally, it offers investors another avenue for ideas, companies, and experts.

"When it comes to brainstorming new ideas," said Perez, "younger scientists from around the world can do it—they really have an edge. They just need to be welcomed into that conversation. Marblar’s gonna do just that."

Party on, punkers.

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Curt Hopkins
Curt writes for Ars Technica about the intersection of culture and technology, including the democratization of information, spaceships, robots, the theatre, archaeology, achives and free speech. Twitter@curthopkins

Thanks for the coverage - great article! We punkers certainly intend to party on

The whole team will be around to answer any questions you guys might have about Marblar. Just drop us a line via twitter on @play_marblar or leave a comment here. We'd love to get some feedback about what we're doing and hope we'll welcome some of you when we launch our full product later this summer.

This paper (http://lars.yencken.org/papers/phd-thesis.pdf) is a graduate student's thesis about a system that creates Japanese exams automatically. I'm not aware of another system that does anything similar. I'm also not sure it would be _that_ useful, but.... The thesis says there are modifications to the system that could be explored. Maybe it could be done commercially?

This paper (http://lars.yencken.org/papers/phd-thesis.pdf) is a graduate student's thesis about a system that creates Japanese exams automatically. I'm not aware of another system that does anything similar. I'm also not sure it would be _that_ useful, but.... The thesis says there are modifications to the system that could be explored. Maybe it could be done commercially?

I'm sure there would be loads of applications for the underlying of adaptive pattern-recognition algorithm. Maybe for computers to become able to ready handwriting? Or a million other things...

I'm no expert in any sense at all, but what they might find is that the "publish or perish" philosophy in academia means that a lot of that 95% of unused "innovation" is actually just kipple.

I'd be the first to agree with that - we have no illusions that we can do something with every patent ever filed. But even bumping the commercialization rate by a few percent would constitute a huge change. And keep in mind - we're talking about 95% of *patented* research, a subset already selected for commercial potential.

Shouldn't step one be to expire patents on orphaned works? Or do people flock to help develop ideas encumbered by patents? Personally, the whole patent thing gives you the feeling that the ideas can only be utilized by those who acquire the patents.

Shouldn't step one be to expire patents on orphaned works? Or do people flock to help develop ideas encumbered by patents? Personally, the whole patent thing gives you the feeling that the ideas can only be utilized by those who acquire the patents.

Hi, the idea is for the crowd to be rewarded for coming up with new and creative ways of using inventions protected by existing IP. The rights to these new ideas are transferred automatically to the original patent holder. As we've discovered in our beta, the users are really mainly in it for the intellectual challenge, experience and community - although the cash prizes obviously sweeten the deal!

If we used expired patents we'd have no-one to pay the prize money and no protection for companies/licensing deals arising out of our challenges.

Hey, be reasonable. Badges are more than the grad-students/slaves get.

Haha, quite right. In all seriousness though - while there will be cash prizes, we're not really looking for the people that would be in it just for the money. We want to provide a great experience and intellectual challenge to them - gamified tech transfer

"not really looking for the people that would be in it just for the money", eh?

I assume you're doing this pro bono, then? 'Cause if the people producing the product aren't getting paid, then I don't see why you should be paid, either.

And "We are working on embedding a method for automatically securing the IP to all ideas posted on our website".

Sorry, nope. You have a choice: a gift economy approach, in which nobody gets exlusive rights (and probably nobody gets paid), or a commerce approach, in which everybody gets paid.

Otherwise, you're just parasites, conning people into giving you ideas for free (or for trivial cash "prizes") because they're part of a "community", then locking those ideas up and selling them. And, for bonus points, the original IP you're trying to make usable is probably itself publicly funded. Your own value add? A Web site any competent programmer could throw together in a week.

Only a fool would waste time on you. Why would anybody give you IP on a good idea in exchange for a badge?

Hi, the idea is for the crowd to be rewarded for coming up with new and creative ways of using inventions protected by existing IP. The rights to these new ideas are transferred automatically to the original patent holder. As we've discovered in our beta, the users are really mainly in it for the intellectual challenge, experience and community - although the cash prizes obviously sweeten the deal!

If we used expired patents we'd have no-one to pay the prize money and no protection for companies/licensing deals arising out of our challenges.

You just said that the main incentive is the intellectual challenge, and the intellectual challenge is the same whether the research is patented or not. Even if you wanted to keep prizes around, there are other ways around that as well. This would seem to attract people who are capable of innovating, so employers that want to hire innovators could advertise there, maybe even pay to have some kind of recruiting program, and employers could see first hand the kind of innovations these people are capable of, so it would seem to have value to them.

You are correct that there would be no protection involved, but I'm not really seeing why there necessarily should be. The person who has actually innovated here is not the one that would get the patent, and the initial research was almost certainly paid for by taxpayers already.

The crux is that large monetary rewards for tasks that require creative thinking tend to have a negative impact rather than positive. We wouldn't be naive enough to think that people would give up their free time and ideas for free, and we have absolutely no intention on 'parasitising' ideas.

A better way to put it is that money is not the ONLY thing that would motivate a marblar to post their idea, as they did in our beta. As PhDs ourselves, we know only too well the stark reality that despite the blood and sweat that grad students and researchers put into their work on a daily basis, the likelihood of making a tangible contribution that benefits humankind is pretty low. This is made worse by the fact that technology transfer is inherently closed - a grad student would never be invited to share their insights in how an abstract piece of technology could be useful. Providing a global platform for scientists to brainstorm around inert discoveries and inventions would go a long way to satisfying one of the basic motivators of becoming a scientist in the first place - solving problems and making a difference.

I applaud you guys for not losing the calm even after the less than positive replies on this comment thread. But unless you give a clear idea on how the IP for the crowdsourced marketization of these orphan patents would work, it seems a bit iffy. And can you guys give links to some research to support your following contention:

Mehmet@Marblar wrote:

The crux is that large monetary rewards for tasks that require creative thinking tend to have a negative impact rather than positive.

. I find it a bit hard to swallow, since the impact of environmental variables on creativity is something which is hotly debated and the science is far from settled, and even if such studies were to exist, my guess would be that they worked with metadata. I don't want to sound snarky, but the whole idea, even though filled with good intentions, seems a bit vague and utopian to me at this stage.

I find it a bit hard to swallow, since the impact of environmental variables on creativity is something which is hotly debated and the science is far from settled, and even if such studies were to exist, my guess would be that they worked with metadata. I don't want to sound snarky, but the whole idea, even though filled with good intentions, seems a bit vague and utopian to me at this stage.

Basically, the idea is that external incentives provide a tighter focus. This focus is beneficial in regards to accomplishing tasks that are straightforward, but effectively act as blinders in tasks that require 'lateral thinking.' It's not really utopian, because it means that most problems can't actually be solved by putting the right incentives in the right place. If we could do that, it'd be a relatively simple matter for governments to solve. It also seems to conflict with the ideas behind copyright and patents, and even gamification, so I'm not quite sure how Marblar rationalizes this information.

I find it a bit hard to swallow, since the impact of environmental variables on creativity is something which is hotly debated and the science is far from settled, and even if such studies were to exist, my guess would be that they worked with metadata. I don't want to sound snarky, but the whole idea, even though filled with good intentions, seems a bit vague and utopian to me at this stage.

Basically, the idea is that external incentives provide a tighter focus. This focus is beneficial in regards to accomplishing tasks that are straightforward, but effectively act as blinders in tasks that require 'lateral thinking.' It's not really utopian, because it means that most problems can't actually be solved by putting the right incentives in the right place. If we could do that, it'd be a relatively simple matter for governments to solve. It also seems to conflict with the ideas behind copyright and patents, and even gamification, so I'm not quite sure how Marblar rationalizes this information.

Hey, thanks for your input. This is really going to the core of where we think Marblar can provide something quite different to existing crowd-sourcing platforms. It will require a fair bit of experimentation on our part, but ultimately we want to find a way of tapping into different and more meaningful motivators than the simple desire for monetary reward. These can include peer recognition, a desire for meaningful work and just plain enjoying the tasks. One paper that lays out a framework for what motivates people in a crowdsourcing context can be found here: http://schader.bwl.uni-mannheim.de/file ... S_2011.pdf

More to the point of our hypothesis is the work by e.g. Dan Pink that he presents in his recent book Drive (http://www.danpink.com/drive) - exactly as knbgnu explains. We think that if we design the challenges, reward systems and community so that the true motivators he names (autonomy, mastery, and purpose) are leveraged, we can get a really constructive, collaborative and creative exchange of ideas happening. Obviously the IP holders are motivated through the prospect of returns but our motivation (and hopefully our users') is to a large extent based on the prospect of helping more inventions actually seeing the light of day.